Electromagnetic radiation – it might sound like something that you'd be better off avoiding, but electromagnetic waves of various kinds underpin our senses and how we interact with the world – from the ...

Microwave communication is ubiquitous in the modern world, with electromagnetic waves in the tens of gigahertz range providing efficient transmission with wide bandwidth for data links between Earth-orbiting ...

The Sun is the Earth's principal source of energy and climate driver. Yet sometimes it sends more light to the Earth than other times. Astronomers working with Natalie Krivova at the Max Planck Institute ...

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, cytosine, and thymine, three key components of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing ...

Using complex computational algorithms based on repeated sampling, a University of Arkansas graduate student helped spearhead a project to develop a computer simulator that provides customized electron beam ...

Venus is covered by a dense layer of clouds which does not display any noteworthy characteristic. However, when looked in the ultraviolet wavelength, it presents conspicuous dark structures. The biggest ...

Scientists have observed an increase in carbon dioxide's greenhouse effect at the Earth's surface for the first time. The researchers, led by scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley ...

Magnetic nanoparticles can increase the performance of solar cells made from polymers - provided the mix is right. This is the result of an X-ray study at DESY's synchrotron radiation source PETRA III. Adding ...

The scientists used the unique Nanocluster Trap experimental station at the BESSY II synchrotron radiation source at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and published their results in the Journal Angewandte Chemie.

Radiation

In physics, radiation describes any process in which energy emitted by one body travels through a medium or through space, ultimately to be absorbed by another body. Non-physicists often associate the word with ionizing radiation (e.g., as occurring in nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors, and radioactive substances), but it can also refer to electromagnetic radiation (i.e., radio waves, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, and X-rays) which can also be ionizing radiation, to acoustic radiation, or to other more obscure processes. What makes it radiation is that the energy radiates (i.e., it travels outward in straight lines in all directions) from the source. This geometry naturally leads to a system of measurements and physical units that are equally applicable to all types of radiation.